Over the event horizon - toward the singularity
When I moved into my current place a few years ago there was an in-ground pool in the backyard. It was unheated & had no cover, so I ended up adding a heatpump as well as a safety cover so that it wasn’t a deathtrap for a young child. The cover is ‘automatic’ in the sense that the opening/closing action is electrically operated via a keyed switch, but I always thought it would be an interesting…
I recently came across a discovery from my distant past. It didn’t seem like much at first glance, just a few text files of code forming a program written in an obsolete programming language, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the direction of my life and career are all a direct consequence of this programs development and presumed destruction. This is a story of the recovery of a long lost…
I’ve been interested in 3D printers for a while now, in particular the thought of being able to take some. of. my. hardware projects to the next level with custom printed cases & components was very compelling to me. So I decided recently to take the plunge and purchase my first 3D printer to see if my expectations matched whats available. I decided to get the Creality Ender 3 . Its one of the…
So like most people at the moment I’m stuck at home as part of the ongoing quarantine for Covid 19 & thankfully I’m fortunate enough to have a job where I can work from home. Unfortunately having most of the neighborhood at home streaming, video-calling, and also working from home during the day is wreaking havoc with the local internet infrastructure and my ISP is not coping well with the added…
So of late I’ve been on a bit of a home automation binge. I’ve added a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs around the house along with some smart switches and light sensors. While you can integrate these in with a first party Philips app, Apples HomeKit, or Google Home and configure some pretty interesting stuff including timers, IFTTT triggers, & voice control - I wanted some very specific behavior for…
Play the game here (Chrome recommended) Star Follow @mrsharpoblunto As part of work I recently had a chance to participate in a 3 day game-jam. In the past I’ve always steered clear of game jams because the ideas I’m usually interested in building have no way of being realized within the time limits. This time however I decided to give it a shot and decided to build a 3D game in the browser using…
Get the source code and schematics here Star Follow @mrsharpoblunto While I’ve always been interested in electronics, I mainly got into software because software affords the flexibility to make mistakes. The cost of failure is low and there is room for experimentation without the risk of wrecking anything expensive (most of the time). While this is great, I always get the gnawing feeling that…
Lets say you have a library of common react components, and that you’re using this library in some other project. If you have some unit tests in your project which use these library components, things work just fine when your project has installed your component library via npm install - but lets say you want to use a local development copy of your components library and npm link it to your parent…
Through a complicated and not particularly interesting sequence of events I’ve ended up with a few weeks of (f)unemployment in between my last incredible journey and my next job. Rather than let this opportunity go to waste I’m planning on filling my time with a few projects I’ve been meaning to get around to doing. Heres project #1 - my attempt at a pixel art rendering of Hong Kong.
I recently decided to shift a bunch of my websites ( sharpoblunto.com , junkship.net , matchstickframework.org ) over from my ancient home built asp.net based framework to something a bit more reliable and low maintenance. I didn’t really want to put a huge amount of effort in to port the sites over, so that cut out options that would involve learning whole new languages and frameworks. Also after…